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Sunday, August 25, 2013

CCM and Our Curriculum

This year I really wanted to focus on writing for three of my four students so I am finally going to implement the IEW Student Writing Intensive B series for them. Well, I say that I am going to do it, but truth is I'm getting a lot of help in the form of two young ladies who have English degrees who went through the program and are holding a class at my house once a week for a handful of kids. Yeah, makes a big difference!

Anyhow, I really want to make sure we all have the time we need to focus on writing, so I decided to get the Classically Catholic Memory - Gamma Year program and use it to cover the rest of the subjects. Here is how I am laying that out:

- I'm taking two weeks for each week of the program (something they recommend doing), so I'll have Week A and Week B.

Week A will go as follows:

Monday - introduce all of the material, practice it, listen to the CD provided and have them start to memorize it.

Tuesday - Review all of the material for the week and focus on Religion and Latin. This means I'll read the question and surrounding information from the Baltimore Catechism and supplement with additional information on the subject so that the kids get the context of the statement to be learned. For Latin, the first hymn we're learning is the Salve Regina. We're all familiar with it, so I'm using the verses to be learned for handwriting practice as well as learning the basic tune on the piano.

Wednesday - Review all of the material and focus on History. The book gives some good background information on the topics to be learned for the week. This year focuses on the 1500s thru the 1800s and American history specifically. I've got some other history books, so we'll supplement our information with those books.

Thursday - Review all of the material and focus on Science. The Gamma year covers chemistry and physics and the book gives a lot of great experiments to do to make understanding and learning the material easier to do. On this day, I'm just following the book.

Friday is always catch up day.

Week BMonday - Review all of the material and focus on Geography. We'll be learning about the Americas this year and they have some pretty cool maps to work with so we'll be doing those activities and supplementing with various books on the current topic.

Tuesday - Review all of the material and focus on Poetry. The CCM curriculum includes two poems, an easier one and a more difficult one. I have kids for both so we will be going over both poems. I plan on learning more about the poets and poetry in general during this time.

Wednesday - Review all of the material and focus on Timeline. Each week the kids have to memorize around 8 major events from creation to John Paul II. There is a lot of information contained on the cards provided so we'll be going through that and then supplementing with other books when necessary. I'm looking forward to focusing on pairing up secular and religious history. Sometimes I think about one or the other but rarely put them in context with each other. When that happens, it is really cool :)

Thursday - This will be recitation day. Each child will have a chance to show what he has memorized throughout the past two weeks.

So there you have it, a basic outline of our curriculum. Of course we will be doing Life of Fred math at the various levels and adding in our music, PE and fine arts classes through our various other activities. I think this will give us good coverage of all areas. I'm not sure how I'll keep updating this yet as I have a few ideas, so stay tuned to find out how this all goes.

We start on the 26th so may God bless all of us as we begin another year of educating our children for eternity :)